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Cherchez la Femme

By Sheila Glaser August 3, 2011 12:36 pmAugust 3, 2011 12:36 pm

Like corpses in a bad horror movie, the women in the D.S.K. scandal pile up behind every door and under every bed. But the woman behind the man, Anne Sinclair, has remained a somewhat shadowy figure. Vanessa Grigoriadis’s piece in New York magazine, borrowing heavily from interviews in Le Monde, Le Nouvel Observateur and the biography Madame DSK, which is currently available only in French, is filled with details of the marriage (both left spouses for each other; she prefers Paris, he their riad in Marrakesh; she broke off a friendship when her friend suggested D.S.K.’s affairs were too numerous to be forgivable even by a Frenchwoman). It also reminds us of Sinclair’s striking readiness, past and present, to stand behind and by her man, despite having a prominent career as a TV host and holding the purse strings.
For those of you hankering for more of the “other woman,” it’s worth reading the account of one Marie-Victorine M. in the Daily Beast, who claims to have found D.S.K. irresistibly magnetic (their eyes met across a room and for four months they had a torrid affair), and yet who believes the account of the Sofitel maid is true. What convinced her? “When I read the first articles in the American press containing for example the detail that he was supposed to have taken his presumed victim from behind, that encouraged me to believe this woman.”

As far as D.S.K. is concerned, the injunction to “cherchez la femme” seems to do little to clarify matters.

Bruce Grierson wrote this week’s cover story about Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist who has conducted experiments that involve manipulating environments to turn back subjects’ perceptions of their own age.Read more…